full issue - Association of Biotechnology and Pharmacy

Current Trends in Biotechnology and Pharmacy
Vol. 5 (3) 1353-1361 July 2011, ISSN 0973-8916 (Print), 2230-7303 (Online)
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conferencing facilities between primary and
secondary sites. With existing servers being
saturated, and with limited bandwidth, high
utilization and large data transfers, the challenges
are in terms of avoiding costly upgrades and want
to see the application performance not being
compromised as well the future application
deployment requirements are taken care of.
Challenge: Enable accelerated replication of
data and virtual server infrastructure to enable
disaster recovery (DR): To have disaster
recovery replication strategy for business
continuity and regulatory compliance reasons.
Every CRO that is implementing DC/DR strategy
should have two facilities geographically
separated. One facility is designated as primary
data center and the second one as secondary data
center or disaster recovery site.
To address these challenges and pave the
way for continued growth, CROs need to initiate
steps like continued geographical expansion,
deepening of service offerings and enhancement
of technological expertise.
The consolidated IT environment will
enable all its users globally many services like
e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), network file
transfers etc. The migration to leading edge
technologies is expected to benefit CRO
enormously in implementing scalable
infrastructure besides enhancing customer
satisfaction, increased employee productivity
and reduced time to market its products and
services.
The solution for the CRO under study: The
demand for data quality, security and privacy
continues to grow as clinical trials evolve with
technological trends. The data acquisition has
shifted from paper to electronic means. The role
of data center and disaster recovery center are
more important than before as the way the data
being captured and managed are changing.
Infrastructure: Table 1 describes the new
infrastructure proposed to replace the existing
IBM systems at the data center.
The new infrastructure has met the following
goals to fulfil the uptime commitments of CRO.
• High availability (24X7)
• No single point failure
• Security
• Manageability
System perspective
Figure 1 describes the IT environment
of the CRO under study that comprises of
physical servers, Local Area Network (LAN)
switches and firewalls in addition to the servers
that are being virtualized catering to varied
business needs and scientific functions.The
primary data centre has built-in redundancy in
terms of core switches and servers, therefore, all
resources are highly available on 24 X 7 scale.
The data replication is carried over the metro link
and the disaster tolerance is provided using
clustering of servers within a site and between
sites as well.
VMware
One of the primary benefits of server
virtualization with VMware is that it allows IT
organizations to consolidate the servers. The
(Table 1) describes the virtualized applications
that are made available in a single physical server
which means a single physical server can support
multiple virtual machines (VMs) and Fig 2
describes VMs specific to each application /or
function within the data center. The applications
that would normally require a dedicated server
can now share a single physical server. The server
virtualization results in a reduction in the number
of servers in a data center, which leads to
Information Technology Consolidation with Virtualization